In praise of ... strict time

Spare a second to salute the time lords, members of the international bureaucracy that keeps the world in synchrony. For most of history, the second was a simple division of the hour, and thus of the day. During the last century it became clear that the days were drawing out, as tidal forces and the vagaries of global weather slowed the planet's rotation, by an average of 0.002 seconds a day, a difficulty for ultra-precise navigation and communications networks that required something more immutable. The solution - from 1959 onwards - was the atomic clock, and the second is now defined as 9,192,631,770 oscillations of a caesium-133 atom at rest and at absolute zero temperature, rather than as a sixtieth of a sixtieth of a twenty-fourth of a rotation of the globe. That presented yet another problem, as the world's collective clockwork became out of step with the oldest and most significant unit of time, the solar day. So since 1972, first the Bureau International de l'Heure, then the Bureau International des Poids et Mesures, and now the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service, has kept universal time in step with the atomic standard. Tonight, there will be another leap second, inserted at the end of the last minute before midnight, GMT. It will be the 25th such leap second since 1972. What a paradox: in all the economic turmoil and bloody national confrontation, there are people who, with a silent extra tick, can impose a kind of universal harmony, and quietly keep us all up to the mark.